Return of Movie Marketing

Just a quick post to point out an unusual bit of coincidence:

In the 3 months prior to and the month following the release of the film adaptation of V for Vendetta, MacGuffin made exactly $.14 more off of that book than we have off of 300 in the 3 months prior to and the 2 weeks since the release of that film adaptation. I found it rather unusual for the difference to be that small, especially considering how much more business we are doing in general this year. To a small degree I'll credit DC with running their consignment program last year, allowing us to always have V for Vendetta in stock and to carry enough to have a small, fully stocked display. On the other hand, knowing the difficulty that Dark Horse has had keeping books in print in the past, we stocked up early and there were only a scant 3 days when we were without a copy of 300 in the months leading up to the film's release.

All of that said, we clearly had proportionally more success with V for Vendetta, especially when you take into account the 20% discount we experimented with in the weeks leading up to the release of the film. In retrospect, the discount was a mistake because nearly every sale we made was to someone coming in specifically for the book rather than as an impulse buy. We gave away money on those sales since the discount was not the deciding factor except in one or two cases. The money we would have saved by eliminating that discount would have more than made up for the smaller unit sales.

Speaking of small unit sales, those of you who have put 2 and 2 together have realized that, once the $30 price tag of 300 and the discount we offered off of the $19.99 price on V for Vendetta are taken into account, we moved roughly half as many units of 300 as we did V for Vendetta, despite a much larger box office performance by the former and a much less faithful adaptation of the latter. Not what I was expecting, but I'm sure the price tag and unusual format of 300 scared more than a few potential buyers off.